​Zineb el Rhazoui

﻿Zineb El Rhazoui is a Morocco-born French journalist. She is a columnist for Paris-based satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. She did not attend the editorial meeting of 7 January 2015 when terrorists burst in and murdered people in attendance, as she was in Morocco at the time.

She is the magazine's religion expert and a passionate critic of Islam. Since the killings, she has become a prominent secularist and human rights campaigner, speaking publicly around the world about Islam and free speech.​She has been accused of “Islamophobia,” a term she rejects, describing it as having first appeared in Iran “a few years ago, as a way of silencing critics of that country's government". Wikipedia.

Charlie Hebdo massacre:On 7 January 2015, Rhazoui was at her home in Casablanca, Morocco, having had her Christmas holiday extended. She sent an article about ISIS's views of women to her editor at Charlie Hebdo and then went back to bed. Two hours later she was awoken by her ringing phone. It was a friend telling her about the massacre at the magazine's offices. During the next few hours, she would learn that twelve of her friends and colleagues had been murdered. She later told Aftenposten that she believed herself to have been one of the terrorists' main targets. “Those of us who are alive,” she said, “are alive only because of small coincidences.”

In a 9 January article for Le Monde, she recalled her massacred colleagues and praised Charlie Hebdo as an “edgy newspaper” but one that “never takes itself seriously.” She stated that “Charlie has never been a newspaper like any other” and that her colleagues had been murdered “because we dared to deride Islam.” A meeting room once “accustomed to jokes and laughter” had become the site of a “bloodbath.” Charb, she remembered, was always worried about the newspaper dying but “cared little about his own death, he who had been under police protection since 2012.” Addressing him, she said: “If you had been here, my Charb, if only you could have seen the place de la République, packed with people, people in tears wearing your portrait in a monastic silence.”

She contributed to Charlie Hebdo issue No. 1178, which was published the week after the killings.